By Logan(Liu Yiyang) from 2301

It’s my pleasure to be here to give a speech under the topic of the role of Chemistry in our daily life. To start with, I would like to state that Chemistry is found in every corner of our everyday life. To make this clear, I’ll first give you some examples.

For instance, some commercial products that provide people with instant energy and nutrients are not edible in the first place, they require heating. But how? One solution, also quite a commonly used one, is to use the reaction between Calcium oxide and water, which is quite exothermic, so it produces a large amount of heat to meet the requirements. Also, being commercially available, Calcium are relatively cheap and this quickly predominates over other heating “agents”.

A seal e.g. is concerned with the erosion of supporting columns used in ancient building. Those supporting columns, made up of another calcium compound, CaCO3, are rigid and long-lasting during the period in which they were made. However, they are now faced with a new challenge which is getting increasingly tricky and difficult to deal with -  Acid Rain. Due to increasing emission of toxic gases, they potentially turn into acids under a condition like SO2 and NO2, etc. These columns are gradually vanishing. The basic mechanism behind this is that CaCO3 reverts rapidly with the acids, producing soluble salts and CO2 as a gas being emitted.  Chemists are so clever that they’ve come up with an acceptable solution – they coat the surface of columns with BeCO3 , which then reacts with SO2 to form BeSO4, which is even more insoluble. This slows down the erosion process.

So, those are just basic Chemistry of some real-life phenomenon and the application of some chemical principals to solve the problems. This means that having a good understanding of the chemical properties of substances, gives us better insights into how we can best solve real-life problems and make the world a better place.